I recently picked up Steep after reading a small review of it. Someone had described it as a great way to do nothing and chill out while playing a game. This sounded ideal to me so, I bought it.

Here’s how my first hour went.

I installed the game and only had to download a measly 1200meg patch so I was playing within, well… minutes. The game puts you right on top of a mountain and the commentator gives you the basics of changing your ‘ride’ and where to launch yourself down the mountain from. You’re then encouraged to speed downhill with nothing but a board strapped to both feet. This is where I realised the true scope of Steep. The mountains are huge and beautiful. They take ages to race down and It’s very impressive. For this first race, I had to go through some checkpoints to get used to the snow board and won my first gold medal.

It was then I went back to the top of the mountain to start again. This is easily achieved at any time by pressing the B button. If you’re failing a race or fall over, you can simply hold down Y to start again. It’s an obvious inclusion because otherwise, you’d be walking for days to get back to the top.

Some more trials followed which got me used to the wingsuit, skiing and the parachute and then I was pretty much left on my own to explore the rest of the mountain…. Which is huge. Did I mention how big it is?

Dropzones seem to play an important part in Steep in that you can only spawn at the top of mountains on them. You can unlock new “dropzones” by locating them with your binoculaurs. I imagine that there’s loads of these but I only got a couple as I was too busy messing about on the mountain.

This is where Steep seems to come into it’s own. You don’t have to do anything by the looks of things as you can merrily snowboard your way around the mountains without a care in the world. Obviously, if you want to unlock more mountain than you’ll have to complete races and such like but the majority of my first hour was spent just messing about.

I was left wanting more which is a good sign for any game. I’ll definitely go back to it and carry on my expeditions.